Aerial View

About

Long before anyone could leave the ground, artists invented the view from above. Jacopo de' Barbari's vast woodcut of Venice (1500) lays out every roof and canal as a bird might see them. Photography made the vantage literal: Nadar photographed from a balloon near Paris in 1858, and James Wallace Black's 1860 balloon view of Boston is among the oldest to survive.

Flight changed how modern artists saw. Reconnaissance pictures from the First World War flattened terrain into pattern, and Kazimir Malevich illustrated his writings on Suprematism with aerial photographs. The Italian Futurists launched aeropainting in 1929, and Tullio Crali painted plunging dives over cities. After 1945 William Garnett, and later Alex MacLean, photographed suburbs, farmland and motorways as abstract grids. Look for tilted horizons, or none at all, and for ground that reads as design before it reads as place.